LF Constructive Criticism!

Hello all, I specifically created this thread in the hopes of gaining some real feedback from people here that clear content and know a little bit about how to raid, especially at the NiM level.

And I've hit a little bit of a snag. With our raid group that I lead, I personally only have very small ideas as to why our group struggles so hard with the content, where none of my suspicions or possible reasons would warrant me to bring them to light.

To put it simply, I don't "say what's need to be said" because I am still unsure of what needs to actually be said. I am equally torn between whether our problem comes in a weak link in the healers, the tanks, or the DPS, so I come here to post a few videos in hopes of getting some feedback from you guys.

Below, I have the link to pretty much every clear we have done on Youtube, ranging from our NiM EC clears at 55 to HM SV and even of our Dreadful Entity clear. The guild is Contra Sanctus on the Imperial side, so if you see any video on Youtube with that guild name, it's us.

So if any elite player would like to take a look and maybe give some feedback as to what they see as the weakness in our raid group, by all means, comment away! Be rude, be mean and hurtful, whatever you feel gets the message across.

Obviously, I believe the last two links give a better insight into our group, as to what the problem may be. Of course, I know the various reasons for things such as "enrage always = bad DPS", but I want to discover what the true cause for weakness is and I don't want to point to specific weak link unless I am positive it needs to actually be said.

Thanks guys, I look forward to hearing from you! Also, just let me know if you want to know the exact team comp for any kill, as I can easily fill you in on what we brought to the event.

Good starting point is to have everybody in your raid group run torparse or parsec. Numbers don't lie. You can see who has the weakest dps, who has the most ehps, how much damage tanks are taking and from what source, and more stuff like that. Parses are a great way for you to dissect the fight bit by bit, and are always the best starting point to see how each individual in a raid performed.

Good starting point is to have everybody in your raid group run torparse or parsec. Numbers don't lie. You can see who has the weakest dps, who has the most ehps, how much damage tanks are taking and from what source, and more stuff like that. Parses are a great way for you to dissect the fight bit by bit, and are always the best starting point to see how each individual in a raid performed.

not standing in red circles while yelling at others to get out of that same red circle is also a good thing, not mentioning any names.

and on a more serious note, its hard to tell whats happening without log files, but it seems you left thundering blast on cd too much and hardcasted cl at least once.

Hey, only looked at the Grob'thok video. Can't comment much on most of the classes there but for your mara, unless I completely missed it, I don't recall seeing the satiated debuff so it looks as though he/she didn't use bloodthirst. It buffs damage/healing by 15% for 15 seconds; it should be used. Your fight lasted long enough that you could have used it twice. Looks like they are in ataru form on the carnage tree, due to the amount of adds that spawn rage is pretty neat for this fight.

Your offtank needs to drag those annoying pigs to the boss. If they're miles away not only can your melee dps not reach them, your other DPS are wasting time killing them and in the meantime nobody is hitting the boss = enrage. Drag the pigs to the boss every time if possible and both boss and pigs can be nuked with aoes. Damage is more efficient that way. Good luck!

Good starting point is to have everybody in your raid group run torparse or parsec. Numbers don't lie. You can see who has the weakest dps, who has the most ehps, how much damage tanks are taking and from what source, and more stuff like that. Parses are a great way for you to dissect the fight bit by bit, and are always the best starting point to see how each individual in a raid performed.

Right, but again, I'm still having trouble dissecting the true problem. Sometimes, I try to call out HPS was too low and the healers need to step up their game. Then I discover in the next pull, DPS running behind different obstacles, blatantly positioning themselves in a manner that forces the healers to fix LoS issues and forcing them to get out of range of the tanks, and thus, low heal numbers.

As a group, I'm just not entirely sure, especially since I'm not exactly sure how to come up with numbers each group should be hitting outside of DPS, especially not for say, what kind of mitigation a tank should be doing in HM content like DF and DP. So, given that the numbers are more likely a problem across all three areas (2-3k in HPS for both healers, 1.9-2.9k in DPS for certain DPS), I'm looking for more of an insightful look into how we play, as the numbers only tell us what the resulting problem in the group is, not a solution or where the playstyle is weak at.

EDIT: I'll get some log files here shortly, after the next couple of posts, and throw them up for viewing.

Looks like they are in ataru form on the carnage tree, due to the amount of adds that spawn rage is pretty neat for this fight.

Your offtank needs to drag those annoying pigs to the boss. If they're miles away not only can your melee dps not reach them, your other DPS are wasting time killing them and in the meantime nobody is hitting the boss = enrage. Drag the pigs to the boss every time if possible and both boss and pigs can be nuked with aoes. Damage is more efficient that way. Good luck!

Stop encouraging this "strategy." This the wrong way to kill the boss and a group that struggles with the encounter will struggle harder if you try to get them to AOE when they don't need to.

Offtank kills the ugnaughts by running them through lava. Nobody else needs to touch them.

1. Agree wholeheartedly with the parser. Some people (I don't think you're one of them) think parsers are evil and that once everyone's DPS is known and public, the person on the bottom is going to be shamed out of the group. It's only like that if you want it to be. Ask your group to download a parser and get into it so that you know where the "problem" could be. Grob'thok can be killed with 3 DPS and not enrage, so the fact that you have the full complement and hit enrage ~15% without any prolonged pipe smash phases (i.e. the tank positioning was more than sufficient) means it's a DPS problem. And as a good DPS you have to know when it's your fault. If you know who your lowest DPS is, when necessary, you can assign them tasks that allow your higher DPS characters more up-time on bosses. Parsers help you determine who is good at what. And that information is priceless.

2. If you're leading, you need to be mindful of the little nuances of specs. I'm not saying you should know how to play each roll of each member in your group (because that's impossible) but I find it very beneficial to be able to speak with other raid members and ask them what their rotation is. Maybe they are going X-X-Y, when it's way better to go X-Y-X and by having an open conversation about it you'll get some more DPS out of people.

3. Open gear discussion. You're clearing some HM content, so clearly you must be somewhat geared. Make sure the group is aware of which augments are "best", and are trying their best to avoid high endurance mods/enhancements

4. Re: Grob'thok specifically. You spend entirely too much time on the adds. The Jugg co-tank should be able to kill them on his own, with maybe a little AoE help from the Merc, or one Sorc.

Around the 3:00 mark I notice the Sniper using Shatter Shot, but you already have Tracer Missile and an off-tank Jugg, who also appears to occasionally put his debuff on Grob'thok (rotationally) after he leaps back. It's a super small thing, but it's a couple of GCDs wasted, and kind of speaks to general "raid awareness". Armor debuffs don't stack. The merc/jugg will put their debuff on rotationally, there's no need for the Sniper to do so as well.

1. Agree wholeheartedly with the parser. Some people (I don't think you're one of them) think parsers are evil and that once everyone's DPS is known and public, the person on the bottom is going to be shamed out of the group. It's only like that if you want it to be. Ask your group to download a parser and get into it so that you know where the "problem" could be. Grob'thok can be killed with 3 DPS and not enrage, so the fact that you have the full complement and hit enrage ~15% without any prolonged pipe smash phases (i.e. the tank positioning was more than sufficient) means it's a DPS problem. And as a good DPS you have to know when it's your fault. If you know who your lowest DPS is, when necessary, you can assign them tasks that allow your higher DPS characters more up-time on bosses. Parsers help you determine who is good at what. And that information is priceless.

2. If you're leading, you need to be mindful of the little nuances of specs. I'm not saying you should know how to play each roll of each member in your group (because that's impossible) but I find it very beneficial to be able to speak with other raid members and ask them what their rotation is. Maybe they are going X-X-Y, when it's way better to go X-Y-X and by having an open conversation about it you'll get some more DPS out of people.

3. Open gear discussion. You're clearing some HM content, so clearly you must be somewhat geared. Make sure the group is aware of which augments are "best", and are trying their best to avoid high endurance mods/enhancements

4. Re: Grob'thok specifically. You spend entirely too much time on the adds. The Jugg co-tank should be able to kill them on his own, with maybe a little AoE help from the Merc, or one Sorc.

Around the 3:00 mark I notice the Sniper using Shatter Shot, but you already have Tracer Missile and an off-tank Jugg, who also appears to occasionally put his debuff on Grob'thok (rotationally) after he leaps back. It's a super small thing, but it's a couple of GCDs wasted, and kind of speaks to general "raid awareness". Armor debuffs don't stack. The merc/jugg will put their debuff on rotationally, there's no need for the Sniper to do so as well.

And see, that's my point. For the Grob Thok fight, we specifically had our DPS turn to AOEing the adds to help our off tank, as the whole raid consensus was that the adds were not dying fast enough in the lava trails and he needed DPS help. This was a Jug tank, if that narrows anything down at all.

So the problem there would not exactly be lack of DPS, it would be the offtank's inability to kill the adds. Which, in pretty much every situation, I find myself attempting to call the problem on something such as "lack of DPS" and discover the problem is caused by something else entirely outside of their control "offtank can't kill adds on his own".

And here we go, I have some logs for my personal numbers to see if this helps. Here are some numbers that we are hitting currently on Corrupter Zero HM, as we have been stuck on him for over 2 months now and just recently got him into the burn phase:

I am Zuhara, a sin tank, running around with full 78s except for the 72 hilt and have the 2 piece set bonus. Am I taking too much damage in these pulls based off the mitigation stats? The last boss fight is a little high, as I was actually tanking the melee mob with the boss at one point, where I literally only survived thanks to Deflection hahaha

Hello all, I specifically created this thread in the hopes of gaining some real feedback from people here that clear content and know a little bit about how to raid, especially at the NiM level.

And I've hit a little bit of a snag. With our raid group that I lead, I personally only have very small ideas as to why our group struggles so hard with the content, where none of my suspicions or possible reasons would warrant me to bring them to light.

To put it simply, I don't "say what's need to be said" because I am still unsure of what needs to actually be said. I am equally torn between whether our problem comes in a weak link in the healers, the tanks, or the DPS, so I come here to post a few videos in hopes of getting some feedback from you guys.

Below, I have the link to pretty much every clear we have done on Youtube, ranging from our NiM EC clears at 55 to HM SV and even of our Dreadful Entity clear. The guild is Contra Sanctus on the Imperial side, so if you see any video on Youtube with that guild name, it's us.

So if any elite player would like to take a look and maybe give some feedback as to what they see as the weakness in our raid group, by all means, comment away! Be rude, be mean and hurtful, whatever you feel gets the message across.

Obviously, I believe the last two links give a better insight into our group, as to what the problem may be. Of course, I know the various reasons for things such as "enrage always = bad DPS", but I want to discover what the true cause for weakness is and I don't want to point to specific weak link unless I am positive it needs to actually be said.

Thanks guys, I look forward to hearing from you! Also, just let me know if you want to know the exact team comp for any kill, as I can easily fill you in on what we brought to the event.

What would make this process a whole lot smoother is you posting your raid group makeup, including specs. Some fights are much harder purely because you decided that 4 concealment operatives were a good idea for Tyrans and stuff like that. So that would give us an idea of what you are working with.

Secondly, as general as this sounds, it does have it's base in truth; Your tanks will dictate how the fight goes in nearly all aspects. The tanks are the people who will move the boss as you see fit and having a decent set of tanks up top who know when to use cool downs, when to swap, how to hold aggro, how to not cleave everyone in the raid amongst many other things will make your progression a whole lot smoother as well. If the tanks position your boss better, then your dps can spend less time moving and more time dosing. If your tank takes less damage because they are using cool downs in a smart fashion, then when one of your dps takes a hit because the frontal cone of Nefra was just too tempting, it's not a huge deal. A lot of raiding problems stem from the tanks being bad. Now you have only really posted clears so we can't actually see the mess ups where things have gone to pieces and you are wondering why, so we can only comment on how your tanks did during that particular pull and really have no idea about their skill level whatsoever, so more information is really required about that. There are many people in swtor who can sit there and get hit by a big beastie and everything is fine, but it's only a few people that can make magic happen when the going gets tough. Do fun little training exercises like going through an operation without ever stopping, no ready checks, no healing up at the end of the fights (except to rez) and just hit as many trash pulls as you can without wiping. TFB is a good one for this as the content is still semi relevant for those that aren't full 78's and even if you are full 78's just pull 2 mobs at once and see how well you go. Tanks that can do everything without their "oh no" buttons like taunts and cool downs will become less reliant on them when raiding and then can learn when the best time to hit those buttons in regards to being proactive about it.

DPS are next, and from the Grob'thok fight, you can pretty much tell the cause, as you hit an enrage timer. The dps were slow on that fight, casting orbitals 3 seconds into the Grob trapped by the magnetic thing is poor pre planning, you know where the boss is going because there is a nice little circle on the ground which informs you where the bondage will happen, pre casting your orbitals and then having a full on burn at every one of those points in time while he takes extra damage is just the greatest thing you can do as a dps. The faster you kill something, the less time you have for stuff to go wrong. It's hard to know just what is going on with your dps as I don't have AMR's and parses in front of me to nitpick at, but tightening rotations and knowing how to plan for burn phases whilst maintaining enough sustained dps is a key ideal for every dps ever. One very picky thing that I did notice in that Grob fight, was that the sorc was killing an add whilst Grob was trapped, which is a fairly big no no. You have a priority system that happens in operations that basically says that you kill the thing that will have the highest chance of killing you first. The add was not going to do enough damage to your sorc within those 10 seconds of burning that your healers couldn't keep up. What you should have done was stunned the add and then proceeded to burn the boss. Simple little things like that will all add up over the course of the fight because you have 8 people that are all dealing with different things at different times and if they delay things even by a little bit, it becomes noticeable just through the sheer quantity of these events.

TLR version: No one is ever going to put out the maximum dps possible, even if they think they have had a flawless run, they can do better, if you have to continually move in a fight, you're doing it wrong, if you require lots of healing during a fight, you're doing it wrong (exceptions of course). Every time you go into a boss fight, you should be learning how the boss moves, what things to watch out for and applying that knowledge to give yourself the best chance at pulling off the most dps you can.

Healers are funny. Healing in this game is so ridiculously easy on average but occasionally requires massive burst healing, a good healer can switch from maintenance healing to burst healing within a couple of seconds, and a bad healer would have been dead long ago. Healing is easy and relaxed for quite a bit of the content and even in NiM content, the only reason why the healing starts out so freaking hard is because people haven't refined and tightened their strategies so people are taking lots of damage that they probably shouldn't be, and you will notice quite a large decrease in the healing as your team gets more comfortable with the fight. That said, because healing is relatively easy and straightforward, no one should ever die. So lets have a look at some contributors to this.

Bad tanks. Poorly optimised tanks are surprisingly not a huuuuge issue these days because of the massive health pool you are able to get and the cooldoowns attached. So someone having iffy stats (as long as the stats aren't stupid like 0 def and 1 absorb to get 55k health) it shouldn't make a massive impact to your healing, your healers may have to work a little bit harder but they shouldn't be overworked in the first place. So the bad tank statement refers to the tank losing threat to a non mechanic related issue at any point in the fight, not swapping at the right time, many many other reasons including the ones I listed above. Tanks are bad, healers get overworked, every little thing suddenly becomes a mountain.

Bad Dps. Dps that don't pull their weight will cause more healing to be required. Dps that love the smell of lava and fire and want to get all warm and toasty and realise a bit too late that fire is actually not a fun place to be chilling in the middle of will increase your healing required.

Bad healers. Every healer has a fairly straightforward rotation, usually 2 abilities that interact with each other via buffs. These rotations are not hard to figure out, the only people that really have to ever worry about RNG are operatives, but even then, when rng decides to throw poo at them, they have so many other ways of proccing TA that it's not even close to being an issue. So healers that are bad will cause more healing to be required. Learn your basic rotations, then add the filler abilities into it. you don't have an infinite pool of resources, but you have the next best thing, an infinitely regenerating finite pool of resources. WoW was basically a race to kill the boss before you ran out of resources, swtor is not. Being aware of just how much you will actually need to heal in order to get someone stabilised is a key piece of knowledge to have. If your dps just got hit for 80% of their health due to a mechanic, there is a very good chance they won't get hit again for quite a while. Your tank however is whimpering in the corner because he is at 10% and has been for the last 10seconds, and is just waiting for an unmitigated attack to kill him. Tank is priority 90% of the time. Dps are expendable if they are bads.

Anyways, without much more information about your raid group including failure videos, it's hard to nitpick accurately and these are just general pieces of advice. there are guides around that give you advice on strategies for each boss (Stuff like Suckafish's DP/DF HM strat guides and KBN's Cooldown guide for Assassins) so look them up and practice being an actual team where people know what they are doing and also know what other people are doing.

The statements and opinions expressed on these websites are solely those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the views, nor are they endorsed by Bioware, LucasArts, and its licensors do not guarantee the accuracy of, and are in no way responsible for any content on these websites.

The statements and opinions expressed on these websites are solely those of their respective authors and do not necessarily reflect the views, nor are they endorsed by Bioware, LucasArts, and its licensors do not guarantee the accuracy of, and are in no way responsible for any content on these websites.